On “toxic feminism” – The Nation and the people

Michelle Goldberg’s article in The Nation got me pretty steamed yesterday, but I want to use that debacle as a ‘jumping off point’ to make a larger point about what is actually happening in these ‘spaces’ and ‘debates’. I’ve made a similar argument in a previous article:

Walking hand-in-hand with privilege is a grossly-misplaced sense of entitlement. All spaces are assumed to be welcome and open, and your opinion is always appreciated and listened to. The fact that you lack relevant knowledge and experience is immaterial – you still deserve a place in the conversation. This is why you see creationists sneer their way through “why are there still monkeys” questions on evolution forums. It also explains why they react with butthurt whines and a cloud of scripture whenever their ignorance is revealed, and especially when it is pilloried. They have never experienced a circumstance where faith was not accepted as evidence; where sincere belief is not a substitute for fact.

The Real Issues

Part of this issue, I think, is that people disconnect the message from the intended audience, and assume that all people having a discussion are having that discussion for the sake of everyone who could possibly be watching. When a person, new to a topic, decides that their perspective on, say “reverse racism” or “misandry” is clearly being neglected and needs to be added to the discussion, they jump in with both feet. This is, in a way that I hope is obvious to readers of this blog, extremely problematic. The term “derailing” describes a circumstance in which someone enters a conversation and tries to change the topic to something ze wants to talk about instead. It’s rude at best, and erodes the possibility of conversation at worst.

The problem, or at part of it, is that different groups of people have differing ideas about what the “real issue” is that needs to be discussed. In Ms. Goldberg’s article, the online push against the Susan G. Komen foundation for distancing itself from Planned Parenthood was an example of when ‘feminists’ united on the “real issue” that feminism is supposed to address. In that case, the voices who claimed that Komen was being “bullied” were wrong, because what was really happening is that ‘feminists’ were expressing a healthy dissent and righteous anger toward people who were trying to damage women’s rights and access to health care. Dissent isn’t bullying, it’s dissent.

But where this argument always falls into hypocrisy is when someone confuses what they personally think the “real issue” is with some sort of objective standard. I’m sure there were feminists who thought that the pushback against Komen was unnecessary, divisive, and counter-productive to the “real issue” of, for example, pay equity. Was the campaign against Komen therefore an example of “toxic feminism” at work, unnecessarily dividing the ‘feminist community’ when what they really needed was “solidarity”? Who gets to make that call? Everyone is free to make it for themselves, but who gets to make that decision for others?

I put it to you that no such decision-maker exists. If Ms. Goldberg had merely said “I have had bad experiences with feminists”, then it’s a personal account of her own lived experience. Fair enough. People can call it short-sighted, maybe, but that’s the nature of personal accounts. Where Ms. Goldberg’s article makes its fatal mistake is when she confuses her own personal perspective (and that of those who agree with her) with one that is objectively true. Repeatedly she makes the assertion that because some people are uncomfortable speaking up, the environment is therefore toxic and must be cleaned up. This is begging the question. There is another explanation: that people who say problematic things get treated like people who say problematic things. The fact that those people don’t like the reaction they get – that they don’t personally think they are at fault – is not necessarily evidence that the reaction is unfair or “toxic”. It might simply be a product of the extraordinary claim that people don’t like being yelled at.

If we can agree that there is no such thing as an objective arbiter of “the real issue”, then we are at sea when it comes to deciding whether or not a given criticism is fair. After all, if you think that I am saying something misogynistic and I don’t see the misogyny, do we just “agree to disagree” (no – the answer to that question is always ‘no’)? In the absence of an empirical test, I have two options: I can either accept the possibility that the person making the accusation sees/understands something that I don’t, or I can brand the criticism as “unfair”. What I have to decide in that moment is as follows: who is more likely to have imperfect information? Is it more likely that I have said something that is at least partially occluded by my relevant privilege, or that the other person is making a false argument?

While I recognize the possibility that it’s the latter, nearly every time I have been in a position to adjudicate a “toxic feminist” environment, it is the case that someone has made a flawed argument and then goes on to complain about being “misinterpreted”. My usual response, therefore, is to assume it’s the former – that I am in the wrong for reasons I don’t yet understand – and interrogate myself accordingly. This is, by the way, a far cry from the ‘sackcloth and ashes’ fear-mongering that is drummed up in Ms. Goldberg’s article and other places. Usually it is enough to apologize and to try and do better next time. It always has been for me. I’ve seen that approach been applied for bad actors elsewhere.

The Place of Anger

Where the Nation piece particularly touched nerves is that it builds, perhaps subconsciously, on a longstanding tactic that is used to dismiss the legitimate grievances of members of minority groups: that they are “too angry”. That if they exercised more “restraint” then their arguments would become more persuasive and more valid. It is very directly a demand that those who are the victims of oppression be more accommodating and sensitive to the needs of the oppressor. The reason it might be particularly galling to WoC feminists is that this meme has been used to dismiss the claims of women (which should have set off a few alarms in Ms. Goldberg’s head) but PoCs, queer people, poor people, whatever the relevant minority group is. It’s the easiest of ad hominem approaches to argumentation.

Now, I want to make something clear here: I do not personally believe that Michelle Goldberg was intentionally gaslighting feminists of colour, queer feminists, whoever. I don’t think she wrote this article with malicious intent. I do not doubt that, from her perspective, she was merely articulating a concern she has with a community that she believes is important and could be more productive on the “real issues” if it managed to stop the “infighting”. This benign intent, however, does not rescue her argument. The argument is still bad, and it is still gaslighting, whether she did it consciously or not.

And this is where the problem ceases to be merely about “wrong” and becomes a discussion about “harmful”. The people who are most commonly on the receiving end of the admonishment about being “too angry” are, usually, the people who bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to the issue under discussion. “Feminist issues” often harm women of colour, poor women, queer women even more strongly than they affect white middle-class women. In a fair world, that would instantly translate into deferential treatment for those perspectives, with the charge being led by those who represent those most affected. In the world we live in, however, the charge is led by those with greatest access (which usually means white people with money and formal education).

It is a perversion of justice indeed to be told that your level of investment in an issue is “too high” by the standards of someone who is less exposed the harms accompanying that issue.

It is a further perversion to be told that the issues that affect you aren’t “the real issues” because they affect people who are not representative of the majority.

And when that perversion manifests itself again and again at the hands of the same group of people (a group that, in other circumstances, is the oppressive class), it ceases to be merely wrong in fact, and becomes linked to a larger series of injustices that the group seeking “solidarity” never seems to get around to. A social justice movement should be concerned with the issues of those most vulnerable to injustice, and yet articles like this one in the Nation only serve to reinforce the fact that justice will be indefinitely delayed by those who are the least vulnerable.

And that hurts.

Far far worse than the bruised feelings of someone who has been called a “sister punisher” when she doesn’t personally believe the charge to be accurate.

On A White Steed

There is another aspect of Ms. Goldberg’s piece that is not addressed by the above criticisms, and I want to take a couple of paragraphs to take it on, because it’s a common complaint:

On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote.

…

One self-described white feminist tweeted at [Jamia Wilson, present for the beginning of the FemFuture discussion] to explain that no women of color had been at the Barnard meeting “and that I needed to be educated about that,” Wilson recalls. Somehow, activists who prided themselves on their racial enlightenment “were whitesplaining me about racism,” she adds, laughing.

Ms. Goldberg does spend a bit of time discussing the fact that the search for ideological purity is a typical hazard of liberal communities – that there will always be someone coming at you from your left. In some cases, these self-appointed guardians of truth embarrass themselves by overstepping their knowledge and assuming that others are in need of “education”. This happens. Yes, it’s annoying. People shouldn’t do that. People are at a particular risk of doing that when they begin admonishing others on behalf of groups they don’t belong to. I am certainly running the risk of mansplaining online feminism as someone who is a middle-class, able-bodied, cis gendered, straight man from Canada.

However, the fact that some people sometimes do shitty things is not somehow evidence that feminism is uniquely “toxic”, or that criticisms of feminists are especially likely to be due to an overabundance of zeal. This is a phenomenon that exists in all spaces, and occurs in all debates. Gamers and comic fans try to out-geek each other. Fans of bands attempt to draw boundaries around who is the ‘real fan’. Yes, it’s annoying. Yes, we should regularly interrogate our own behaviour to make sure we’re not doing that, and if that had been the entirety of Ms. Goldberg’s point then there wouldn’t be much to talk about.

The problem occurs when we turn the blame and interrogation outward and say “you’re looking for enemies”. We then get right back to identifying anger as the problem – that is, the kind of anger that is not directed at “the real issues”. Instead of identifying ‘enemies’ based on their actions, the “looking for enemies” meme attributes a very specific motivation to people’s objections to someone’s statements: that the offence is not a reaction to real hurt, but that it is instead a political tactic akin to “playing the race card”. And again, while I do not think Ms. Goldberg is consciously, knowingly, and intentionally making a “race card” argument, the fact that she “didn’t mean it” does not rescue her argument from being built on flawed premises.

I hope that I have not been unfair to Ms. Goldberg here. I have no particular beef with her as a person – aside from a couple of appearances on MSNBC shows, I don’t know anything about her. Her piece is not the first such article to be written making this absurd argument, nor is it likely to be the last. I have tried here to engage with what she said, because the structure and components of the argument she is making are wrong, and I’m sure that she’d be among the first to articulate a version of the points I make above if an article decrying online feminism as being “hostile to men” were to be published somewhere prominent.

We’ve been involved over the years in various transformative justice and community accountability efforts. We know something about the importance of allowing for mistakes. We all make them. We understand something about intentions (good and bad). But we also understand the imperative that when you know better you should try to do better. And here’s the thing. Many white feminist now know better (or they should) but they simply refuse to do better. That’s the truth. The pain, anger, and frustration that emanate from this must find their place. Often, that place is online.

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Comments

Great essay; thanks for sharing. I…would argue that this is malicious. It is repetitive, targeted and silencing. It is not accidental and solely based on her own internalization of narrow views of feminism. This woman wrote an article to defend Justine Stacco. At this point, I would not trust her intentions. But as you pointed out and as I well know, good intentions are irrelevant. You’ve already illustrated why. Great read.

Who cares about her intentions? The biggest problem is that people feel so free to question other’s integrity based on something they see on the internet. Like the article indicates – if you are questioning someone’s character because they have disagreed or criticized you, you are ignorant. You likely know very little about the person, and thus your talk about their character is almost per se ignorance. Such ignorant, mean-spirited discussion is a large part of the problem in the feminist community (though by no means limited to that community).

Ashley, do you see the part where I quoted YOU saying that “the biggest problem” is shit that happens with people’s integrity on the internet? Do you…

…actually never mind. I think we’re probably done here.

AshleyFebruary 6, 2014

By biggest problem I mean in the context of people yelling at each other on the internet, which seemed to be the thrust of the entire article, as opposed to biggest problem in the history of the universe.

But anyways, people are certainly claiming to be silenced by the angry internet. Either we are fine with people being silenced or we are not fine. It’s easy to say that what’s going on isn’t abuse but is actually criticism. My point is that a statement like “I don’t trust her intentions” is more abusive than constructive. It ignores what is written and instead proceeds directly to a personal attack. This idea that good intentions are irrelevant but bad intentions are extremely relevant isn’t very consistent.

Saying “I don’t trust her intentions” is not an attack, and this is my problem with the “people are being bullied” crowd – zero sense of perspective. None. At all. Trudy was responding to a statement that I made, saying that I don’t know that Ms. Goldberg was being malicious. Trudy said that she DOES think Ms. Goldberg was being malicious. This is not an attack – it is a statement of belief that is relevant to how we interpret the Nation article that is being discussed. It’s not even “yelling”, which I don’t agree is what this article is about, but that’s irrelevant. If saying “I don’t trust you based on your previous bad behaviour” is an unreasonable attack, then the standard of discourse that you are demanding is absurd in the extreme. You are essentially saying that nothing negative can be said, no matter how relevant, because if people’s feelings get hurt then they are being “silenced”.

Also, it helps to read ALL THE WAY THROUGH the comments, since IMMEDIATELY after saying “I don’t trust her intentions”, Trudy said “intentions are irrelevant”. So yeah. Not an attack. Not abusive. Not inconsistent. Just a statement of belief.

Finally, and this is where I am gripping my keyboard with frustration and rage, if you cared to look at the incessant actual abuse that Trudy gets on a regular basis, you (like me) would find the statement “Saying ‘I don’t trust her’ is abusive” to be infuriating and sickeningly hilarious. The vast majority of abuse, of stalking, of threats, of harm are borne by those who criticize the majority perspective, not of purportive “allies” who demand special treatment from those they claim to be allied to. THAT is the main thrust of the entire article (well, mine anyway – not sure if you read it or not). If you want to trivialize the abuse that members of minority groups undergo by calling everything you don’t like “abusive” then I suppose that’s your privilege.

AshleyFebruary 6, 2014

Saying you don’t trust someone’s intentions is obviously a personal attack. If you said something, and someone dismissed it because they didn’t trust you, I can’t imagine you would take that as some sort of benign act. Nor should you. Saying you don’t trust someone’s intentions is a more or less direct statement that the person is underhanded and shady. They act in a way to deceive others.

Is it the worst thing ever said about someone else? Perhaps not, though she is questioning someone’s integrity, which is something most people value. Regardless, your point makes no sense. Trudy receives worse abuse, so magically abuse is ok? It’s ok for Trudy to verbally abuse people, but when people abuse Trudy it is wrong? There is some level of abuse that is ok, but after that point it is not ok? Ironic, because Trudy doesn’t trust Michelle Goldberg because she “defended Justine Sacco” by saying that while Sacco deserved to be fired, the level of abuse she received from people was over the top? What is this abuse line? How much abuse is too much abuse?

Which is really my main point, and matches with your main point. Criticism of someone’s position is wonderful. Abuse of someone because they have the audacity to have a position you disagree with is demeaning and unacceptable. You can say all sorts of negative things, but saying negative things about someone’s character is a whole different sort of negative than deconstructing their arguments. There may be lots of excuses for demeaning other people, but then excuses and a justifications are two different things. Ms. Goldberg’s article certainly highlights the tendency people have to try and abuse their way into winning an argument rather than reasoning their way into winning an argument. Trudy’s post illustrates it.

Finally, Trudy didn’t say “intentions don’t matter.” She said “good intentions don’t matter.” This sort of no-win for people is the entire point of Michelle Goldberg’s article. People stop talking publicly for fear of being demonized no matter what they say. This is actual silencing. Saying “good intentions don’t matter” is often just an excuse for more abuse. Abusers tend to be good at finding excuses for their behavior, as I’m sure you have experienced. (Not trying to call Trudy some sort of gross abuser, but I’m tired of hearing that phrase. Yes, good intentions matter. Bad intentions matter. Intentions matter. However, the level of evidence for exploring someone’s intentions is not just did they write something somewhere previously with which you disagreed).

Saying you don’t trust someone’s intentions is a more or less direct statement that the person is underhanded and shady.

If you’ve stolen my wallet 8 times and then tell me “hey, I’ll watch your wallet for you while you go to the bathroom”, your position is that it’s ABUSE if I say “I don’t trust you”? Yeah. No. Not even a little. This ongoing attempt to classify “negative things people say” as being equivalent to abuse is a pretty standard gaslighting tactic. You’ll find no sympathy for the argument here, no matter how many times you repeat it.

You say “intentions matter”, but I think we are using different definitions of what it means to “matter”. My position, Trudy’s position, and the position of this article is that good intentions do not make up for malign behaviour. Do you disagree?

AshleyFebruary 8, 2014

Sure, if someone keeps stealing your wallet, you would be quite justified to say “I don’t trust this person’s intentions around my wallet.” However, in that case you have quite a bit of strong evidence of that person’s intentions around your wallet. However, in this instance, the proffered evidence of intentions is more or less “this person is a human being who isn’t me.” This is not a very good justification for distrust. It’s not about measuring the degree of abuse = it’s about toleration of it. It’s unfair to judge another human being for the crime of not being you.

As far as intentions, yes I disagree. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the greatest American book and a powerful message against racism, but is banned in America by many schools for its use of the n-word and therefore causes some sort of harm. The Bluest Eye is a wonderful book about race, self-doubt, and sexual abuse, but is banned in many places because it imposes some “harm” by exposing readers to said subjects. The “harm” that is being caused is not some sort of absolute measure. It’s relative to whomever is experiencing and judging the harm. Even in the example of Justine Sacco, her tweet could be considered racist and inflammatory, or a criticism of white privilege. How can we possibly judge these things without some sort of knowledge of intent? I hate, hate, hate, hate the idea that we have to accept words as absolute, without any thought of irony, sarcasm, intent, or any other thought besides the lowest common denominator.

Sure, if someone keeps stealing your wallet, you would be quite justified to say “I don’t trust this person’s intentions around my wallet.” However, in that case you have quite a bit of strong evidence of that person’s intentions around your wallet.

Aha, so what you’re saying is that YOU, Ashley, have a better sense of what qualifies as “strong evidence” for whether or not someone is trustworthy than, for example, Trudy does. Well that’s a relief. Please tell me the objective standard you are using, so that we can let everyone else in the world know.

It’s relative to whomever is experiencing and judging the harm

Wait, but what’s this? All of a sudden you DON’T have an objective standard for judging these things? I find this very confusing indeed.

Also confusing is your paragraph that you seem to claim justifies your stance on intent, but has absolutely NOTHING to do with intent. What it does reveal, however, is that you have zero idea of what the objections to Sacco’s statement (and the statements of those who defended her) actually were, and instead are going ‘all in’ on the “black people don’t understand sarcasm” gambit. But since you didn’t MEAN IT, that magically means that’s not the argument you’re making! What a mysterious world we live in!

Have you ever considered the possibility, Ashley, that people who were upset by Justine Sacco, or who are upset by Tosh’s rape joke, or who are otherwise angry at people’s actions in the absence of malign intent are PERFECTLY AWARE of the intent of the speaker? That it’s not that they just don’t “get it” and that, if they did, they wouldn’t be upset? Is that something that seems even remotely possible to you?

Because if you do something without MEANING TO HURT ME, and you hurt me, and I KNOW you didn’t mean it, that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. It doesn’t change the problematic ideas that underlie your actions, it doesn’t change anything. All it does is provide you, the one who has harmed others, a convenient back door through which to divest yourself of any responsibility. It’s what a child does when caught breaking furniture – “well I didn’t MEAN to”. It’s begging those harmed by your actions to deal with the harm, without you having to actually do anything to ameliorate it, or even recognize that you’ve done it.

It’s not that people IGNORE intent, it’s that they (we) judge intent separately from outcome. You seem to think that good intent obviates outcome. It doesn’t. At all.

Wow your tweets missed her point HARD. You claim she contradicted herself by praising the activism again the Komen Foundation – that she forgets “the number people who said that Komen was being “bullied”, how criticism was “divisive”” – and that this somehow contradicts her complaints about the abuse meted out in the blogosphere.

But she was talking about vitriolic abuse, not communal activism. They’ve both been called bullying and divisive but they’re not the same thing, and you can object to one without objecting to the other. How is this complicated? Object to one kind of bullying (twitter abuse) and it doesn’t mean you immediately object to *everything that has ever been called bullying by anyone*. That’s not difficult. It’s just intellectually dishonest to pretend that she was contradicting herself by objecting to what she considers bullying while praising what she clearly doesn’t, because other unrelated people do consider it bullying. Is it that you think no one can object to any bullying without agreeing with those unrelated people? Is bullying a complaint off limits? Silly.

I challenge you to a) define the difference between the two, and b) demonstrate that “vitriolic abuse” is in fact what is happening. I have seen too many examples of activism labeled as “abuse” by people whose feelings are hurt because THEY are the targets of criticism. I do not accept your assertion that the difference between the two is clear in all cases, or even in this specific one.

objecting to what she considers bullying while praising what she clearly doesn’t

Yes… “what SHE considers bullying” is an extremely pregnant qualifier.